Monday 12th June 2017
Cuteness alert!
We have masses of chicks as described yesterday but our turkey and duckling numbers continue to be terrible. We usually get 10-15 ducklings at a time. This year we got three from Banana (who then had two of them ‘taken’ and herself disappeared shortly after with the remaining one) and now we have just two from Pear. She had been sitting on five eggs which were fertile and growing but has only managed to get two chicks from them. The original clutch was over ten but due to nest sharing, had dwindled...
Tonight we put our duck family of three and our Gosling trio plus their chicken mum (QBB, another of Queenie’s daughters) in the 4-acre field shelter with netting over the front to keep them all in. It is another half-way house in that the birds are in the fresh air, get natural sunlight and have a huge space BUT are still fairly safe. We don’t have too many worries about predators as such, it’s more that to allow such vulnerable youngsters to totally free range in all our long grass is, we feel, a tad risky, especially as we lost two ducklings this way. We just don’t think they would manage to stick together so well. In our experience young chicks are better at keeping up with their chicken mums than ducklings are with their duck mums, adult chickens certainly do a lot more’ talking’ to their offspring!!!
There is masses of straw in the shelter and we also cut a load of grass, although we snipped it into small pieces so that it won’t get stuck in gullets (we hope).
The goslings are huge and don’t all fit under mum anymore, and they are not yet two weeks old. They are fantastically noisy too.
Meanwhile back in the barn we now have Napoleona and Elizabeth in the Broody wing with just THREE poults: one of them being Jack’s ‘jumper’ turkey from 6th. The other two hatched out on 8th and 10th but because the clutch of eggs they emerged from was such a mixture of potential hatching dates, we popped them under the heat lamp whilst we waited to see what else might hatch and how many poults we might end up with. Today we candled all the remaining turkey eggs that Napoleona and Elizabeth were still sitting on. Last time we did this we found a good eight or so that looked viable. Well, two of those have hatched as described above and the rest seemed to have died!!!
Deciding whether to move Napoleona or Elizabeth to become ‘mum’ to the group of three became redundant, we moved them both so giving the lucky poults TWO mums to look after them!!
The good thing about turkeys is they are very vocal a lot of the time and so it did not take long for all the birds to find each other and start to snuggle down...
There is masses of straw in the shelter and we also cut a load of grass, although we snipped it into small pieces so that it won’t get stuck in gullets (we hope).
The goslings are huge and don’t all fit under mum anymore, and they are not yet two weeks old. They are fantastically noisy too.
Meanwhile back in the barn we now have Napoleona and Elizabeth in the Broody wing with just THREE poults: one of them being Jack’s ‘jumper’ turkey from 6th. The other two hatched out on 8th and 10th but because the clutch of eggs they emerged from was such a mixture of potential hatching dates, we popped them under the heat lamp whilst we waited to see what else might hatch and how many poults we might end up with. Today we candled all the remaining turkey eggs that Napoleona and Elizabeth were still sitting on. Last time we did this we found a good eight or so that looked viable. Well, two of those have hatched as described above and the rest seemed to have died!!!
Deciding whether to move Napoleona or Elizabeth to become ‘mum’ to the group of three became redundant, we moved them both so giving the lucky poults TWO mums to look after them!!
The good thing about turkeys is they are very vocal a lot of the time and so it did not take long for all the birds to find each other and start to snuggle down...